Ernst Chladni Collection, 1777-2016

Chladni's work on meteorites was stimulated by the observation by the astronomers Johann Bode and Johann Titius of an apparent a gap between Mars and Jupiter. Based on the geometrical distances between the other known planets we would expect to find another planet at that distance from the sun. Chladni took this as evidence that meteorites might have their origin in metal and rock from this unformed planet. Later astronomers would locate the asteroid belt in just this area between Mars and Jupiter.

One of Chladni's very numerous scholarly articles on the subjects of meteorites.

Two examples of iron meteorites, typical of those in Chladni's collection. Tektites are small glassy objects resulting from asteroid impacts with the earth, cooling from molten glass to a solid before falling back to earth. Moldavites are a specialized form of green glass tektite, formed from the impact of a giant meteorite that caused the Nördlinger Ries crater in Bavaria. Almost all moldavites have been found in southern Bohemia.

An extremely rare survival, this announcement of one of Chladni's numerous public lectures would normally have been thrown away at the time of the lecture.

From the end of 1808 to April 1810 Chladni was in Paris, where he learned that Napoleon I had expressed an interest in meeting him. In February 1809 he was invited to the Tuileries, where he demonstrated his instruments to Napoleon and performed acoustical experiments. Napoleon urged Chladni to have his textbook on acoustics translated into French; the following day he supplied 6000 francs to this end. Chaldni dedicated the book to Napoleon when it appeared in November.

Chladni's final researches on acoustics, extending the material in his 1787 masterwork in German, Die Akustik. One of many editions of these volumes.

An account of Chladni's researches published in a French journal, illustrating his reputation in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the latter part of the century, images of Chladni's signature experiments, now almost commonplace.

Chladni designed two types of instrument based on the principle of the glass harmonica: the Euphon, in which glass rods are stroked to produce a scale of notes, and the Clavicylinder, in which nested glass bowls are revolved in water by a foot pedal, and the notes sounded by pads lowered on the glasses by keys in a conventional clavichord keyboard. These pads take the place of moistened fingers that sound the notes in a more traditional glass harmonica familiar to Mozart, who composed for it, and Benjamin Franklin, who developed his own version in Philadelphia. This clavicylinder was built in Turin by Louis Concone, while Chladni was in residence in the city, at the home of the Conte Nuvolone Pergamo (see items C1 and C2). The line drawing was made by Steve Tilden for Bread & Caviar, 2016 (item D17).

In 1810-1811 Chladni spent six months at the home of Count Giuseppe Nuvolone Pergamo di Scandaluzza, the deputy president of the Royal Agrarian Society of Turin. The Count was a serious scholar of northern Italian agricultural practice. He is now best known for having published the first ampelography of Italian wine: Sulla coltivazione delle viti et sui metodo migliore di fare e conservare i vini. (Calendario della Società Agrario di Torino, 1798). His other publications include research on the cultivation of hemp (1788), of cotton, the volume in our collection (1808), and an overview of Piedmontese agrcultural practice in French: Sur le progres de l'agriculture et de l'industrie en Piemont (Turin, 1804).

Some two dozen of Chladni's letters still survive. This letter was written to an unknown professor in Padua after Chladni's six-month residence with Count Nuvolone Pergamo in Turin. It enclosed some seeds for the professor from the Count, which Chladni is mailing to him since he will probably not be visiting Padua this year (though he seems after all to have done so). The watermark of this 1811 letter (a cherub displaying a banner with the Latin motto TO PARADISE) is identical, apart from the motto, with watermarks in paper used by Thomas Jefferson between 1802 and 1811. The countermark in one of the Jefferson sheets (GM, with a fleur-de-lis) makes it almost certain that the papermaker was Giorgio Magnani of Cartiera Magnani in Brescia, a firm founded in 14104 and still an important mill. Jefferson may have purchased hsi stock during his stay in Paris; Chladni could have found Magnani paper in Italy, Paris, or almost anywhere in Europe.

Johann August Apel was a short story writer who Chladni met at the university in Wittenberg. Later he was a guest at Apel's home in Leipzig in 1815. Apel's story "Der Freischütz" was the basis of the Carl Maria von Weber opera of 1821. In a French translation it also inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

This study of two kinds of northern Italian crop, published in Lucca, was plagiarized from earlier research on these topics, perhaps that of the Count Nuvolone in Turin.

This letter from Leipzig, to Weber's publisher Leopold Voss in the same city, apologizes for the late delivery of two book manuscripts and expresses confidence that he and the publisher will have no difficulty in agreeing to a contract. The Weber brothers (Ernst, Wilhelm and Eduard) grew up in Wittenberg, where their father was a Professor of Dogmatics. They lived in the same house as Chladni, who stimulated in them a love of science. Each of them became distinguished scientists in their own right whose research advanced some of Chladni's central themes and interests. Ernst Weber made significant contributions to the physiology of the senses and helped found the field of psychophysics. He was also Chladni's first biographer. He made the first study of the perception of two close touches on various parts of the body (see E.H. Weber on the Tactile Senses (1996)). When Keats met Coleridge on Hampstead Heath in 1819, one of the topics of the older poet's monologue (along with nightingales, dreams, nightmares, the Kraken, mermaids, and ghost stories) was a theory about "single and double touch." In this Coleridge was surely echoing Weber's researches, perhaps relayed from Chladni through their joint acquaintance Lichtenberg at Göttingen. Wilhelm Weber was a physicist who derived a law of electric force and studied water and sound waves. The unit of magnetic flux (Wb) was named after him. Eduard was a physiologist at the University of Leipzig who studied human locomotion with his brother Wilhelm. He also collaborated with Ernst o the study of waves of sound, light, and liquid, after Chladni's work, resulting in the first account of hydrodynamics in the circulation of the blood. In 1825 the three brothers collaborated on a publication establishing the basic laws of hydrodynamics, which they dedicated to Chladni.

A view of Breslau from the east, published soon after Chladni's death in the city. The cathedral is to the right, on the north bank of the Oder. The University and the Dom Steffensa (the Steffens house) where Chladni spent his last evening, are in the center on the south bank, behind trees, with beyond them (to the right of the trees) the pointed spire of the Nikolaikirche, to the west of the old town, where Chladni was buried; the towers of the medieval old town are to the left of the engraving.

The Count de Lacépède, like Chladni a fine amateur musician, was famed as a zoologist who completed Buffon's Natural History. He was present at Chladni's meeting with Napoleon in February 1809.

Johann Theodor Mosewius (1788-1858) was a singer and music director. He directed the Königsberg Opera under August von Kotzebue from 1814, and in 1816 moved to Breslau, where he founded the Singakademie and taught music at the university. Later in life he published studies of Bach's work. He took Chladni home from Steffens' house on the last night of his life. This letter, addressed to the operatic singer Mathilde Hellwig, begins with sympathy with her over an illness. On 4 June 1828, in a letter enclosed in correspondence with their mutual friend Franz von Schober, Mosewius had assured Schubert of his admiration for his songs, including perhaps the first independent praise of Winterreise.

James Davenport Whelpley (1817-1872), a noted polemicist on immigration and other subjects, was one of the owners of the American Whig Review, which published poems and stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Whelpley himself wrote stories with a supernatural or science fiction slant; in this example a jealous husband uses a listening device based on Chladni's researches to spy on his wife.

In 1827, at the age of 76, Chladni came to Breslau, where he attracted a circle of admirers and was a prominent part of the local social life. One of his friends was Henrik Steffens (1773-1845), a professor at the University of Breslau from 1811 to 1832. Steffens was a philosopher who promoted the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling. He was influenced by his study of geology, and promoted the doctrine of "Individualization," according to which organisms become more distinct the higher on an evolutionary scale they appear.